All Articles in Internet Law

Enforcing Constitutional Rights Through Computer Code, Steve Young

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Lawmaking and enforcement has advanced since Hammurabi first wrote out his legal code thousands of years ago. Today, the American legal system relies on legislatively-enacted federal, state, county, and municipal legal codes, agency-created regulations, the judge-made common law, and various law enforcement entities. This can be a confusing and complex system of rules and their explanations with varying degrees of enforcement. Blockchain technology is an automatic and efficient alternative to written codes that must be humanly-enforced. There has been limited scholarly interest in the implications of a legal application of blockchain technology to a political system but there have been ...

Smart Baby Monitors: The Modern Nanny Or A Home Invader, Sarah Ensenat

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Smart baby monitors exist to help parents protect and watch over their children. The smart baby monitors act as a second set of eyes when parents cannot be in the same room as their children. Low-tech hackers take advantage of gaps in the security of smart baby monitors. A hacker violates a consumer’s privacy by gaining access to private information, viewing the home and its occupants, and even speaking to children through the monitor.

This comment advocates for stricter security legislation for smart baby monitors. Without new legislation, manufacturers of smart baby monitors do not apply or invest in ...

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

In modern society, cell phones have become a virtual extension of most Americans. Advances in cell phone technology have given rise to the popularity of mobile dating applications (“apps”), which are capable of allowing users to date and meet potential partners without leaving the comfort of their own homes. The convenience and allure of mobile dating apps has led to a staggering increase in the number of crimes orchestrated against other users of the apps. Such crimes often include solicitation, stalking, murder, and human trafficking. Unsuspecting and trusting users fall victim to these crimes due to the false sense of ...

Masthead

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Peeling Back The Student Privacy Pledge, Alexi Pfeffer-Gillett

Duke Law & Technology Review

Education software is a multi-billion dollar industry that is rapidly growing. The federal government has encouraged this growth through a series of initiatives that reward schools for tracking and aggregating student data. Amid this increasingly digitized education landscape, parents and educators have begun to raise concerns about the scope and security of student data collection. Industry players, rather than policymakers, have so far led efforts to protect student data. Central to these efforts is the Student Privacy Pledge, a set of standards that providers of digital education services have voluntarily adopted. By many accounts, the Pledge has been a success ...

Prophylactic Merger Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship

An important purpose of the antitrust merger law is to arrest certain anticompetitive practices or outcomes in their “incipiency.” Many Clayton Act decisions involving both mergers and other practices had recognized the idea as early as the 1920s. In Brown Shoe the Supreme Court doubled down on the idea, attributing to Congress a concern about a “rising tide of economic concentration” that must be halted “at its outset and before it gathered momentum.” The Supreme Court did not explain why an incipiency test was needed to address this particular problem. Once structural thresholds for identifying problematic mergers are identified there ...

Black Letter Law, Dan Svantesson

Law Faculty Publications

[Extract] The topic of how well the tool of black letter law works in the Internet law setting is of course huge, and associated with obvious definitional challenges. To point to but one; how ought we define “black letter law” in our present legal culture where legal rules necessarily must take account of the technical reality in which they operate? Indeed, given Wikipedia’s definition of “black letter laws” as laws that are “the well-established technical legal rules that are no longer subject to reasonable dispute,” one may legitimately question whether we can speak of any real black letter law ...

Student Research Day Abstracts and Posters

This project examines how current copyright laws and digital distribution practices in music can be improved for both the creator and the consumer. The laws that govern our digital atmosphere, and thus a large portion of music distribution, are outdated and cause a wide variety of problems for both artists and fans. To create a comprehensive picture and establish the scope of this problem, I start by outlining the process a song goes through from when it is written to when it is in the hands, or rather ears, of listeners. From there, copyright laws are entwined with this process ...

"The Exclusive Right To Their Writings": Copyright And Control In The Digital Age, Jane C. Ginsburg

Maine Law Review

The recent coincidence of new technology and new legislation in the United States may have enhanced the ability of U.S. copyright owners to wield electronic protective measures to control the exploitation of their works. The legislation, which reinforces the technology, has led many to perceive and to deplore a resulting imbalance between copyright owners and the copyright-using public. Critics assert that the goals of copyright law have never been, and should not now become, to grant “control” over works of authorship. Instead, copyright should accord certain limited rights over some kinds of exploitations. Economic incentives to create may be ...

The Unicorn Governance Trap, Renee Jones

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

The recent trend of large-scale start-up companies delaying an IPO creates a new kind of corporate governance problem. The prevalence of “unicorns” – privately held companies with market valuations of $1 billion or more – means the disciplinary mechanisms on which investors traditionally relied no longer function to prevent misconduct or mismanagement by unicorn founders. High profile frauds by unicorns like Zenefits and Theranos, and the recent travails of Uber highlight the need to rethink unicorn governance structure. These burgeoning controversies call for reconsideration of legal reforms that allow unicorns to remain for protracted periods in an ill-defined limbo between private and ...

An Economic Analysis Of The Law Surrounding Data Aggregation In Cyberspace, Johnathan M. H. Short

Maine Law Review

The emergence of technological advances has traditionally created new and unique legal problems. The solutions to counter these problems are often drawn from our legal traditions and adapted to an ever-modernizing world. However, as Professor Coase opined at the dawn of the communication technology revolution, “lawyers and economists should not be so overwhelmed by the emergence of new technologies as to change the existing legal and economic system without first making quite certain that this is required.” Examination and reflection, in other words, is paramount to instituting a sound legal framework to encompass developing legal problems in technology. This Article ...

Desperately Seeking Solutions: Using Implementation-Based Solutions For The Troubles Of Information Privacy In The Age Of Data Mining And The Internet Society, Tal Z. Zarsky

Maine Law Review

Our personal information is constantly being recorded, stored and analyzed. Commercial entities watch our every action, storing this data and analyzing it in conjunction with information acquired from third parties. These entities use this knowledge to their benefit (and at times, our detriment) by discriminating between various customers on the basis of this personal information. At the same time, in the media market, large conglomerates can now provide specifically tailored content to individual customers on the basis of such data, thus potentially controlling their perspectives and impairing their autonomy. The expanding use of data mining applications, which enable vendors to ...

Freeing The Mind: Free Software And The Death Of Proprietary Culture, Eben Moglen

Maine Law Review

The subject matter we are going to talk about is variously named and the words have some resonances of importance. I am going to use the phrase “Free Software” to describe this material, and I am going to suggest to you that the choice of words is relevant. We are talking not merely about a form of production or a system of industrial relations, but also about the beginning of a social movement with specific political goals, which will characterize not only the production of software in the twenty-first century, but the production and distribution of culture generally.

Faculty Scholarship

Looking backwards on the occasion of Telecommunications Policy’s fortieth anniversary reveals just how far U.S. communications policy has come. All of the major challenges of 1976, such as promoting competition in customer premises equipment, long distance, and television networking, have largely been overcome. Moreover, new issues that emerged later, such as competition in local telephone service and multichannel video program distribution, have also largely been solved. More often than not, the solution has been the result of structural changes that enhanced facilities-based competition rather than agency-imposed behavioral requirements. Moreover, close inspection reveals that in most cases, prodding by ...

Akron Law Review

In proposing a new rule under the First Amendment to adjudicate anonymous Cyberbullying cases, this Article first reviews and summarizes the First Amendment precedents governing regulation of speech by minors and student speech in the school environment. Second, it reviews and discusses the prevalence of minors’ online harassment or Cyberbullying, including pre-litigation disputes reported in the press. Third, it reviews and summarizes the First Amendment precedents governing the “unmasking” of anonymous speakers. Finally, the Cyberbully Unmasking Test is proposed and applied.

Maine Law Review

For those within the information technology (IT) industry, the phrase “open source” has been as prominent at water cooler and boardroom discussions over the last several years as the phrase “out source.” Open source is at once a software development model, a business model, a social movement, and a philosophy that has recently garnered attention from outside of the IT sphere. As such, the topic has become increasingly fertile ground for academic scholarship from several disciplines. Economists, legal academics and practitioners, computer engineers, and social commentators have offered their varying perspectives on open source software. Whether or not this attention ...